The impact of good directing illustrated

December 6, 2014

It's not often that you get a master class in the
importance of directing, and in about three minutes
flat. But now we have one, courtesy of a competition between
Studio Khara and game developer CyberConnect2. As ANN explains
(via), both
studios made shorts based on the same character designs (and maybe 3D
models, it's not clear), basic situation, and maybe even scenario outline,
and the contrast between them is really illuminating.

Let's start with CyberConnect2's version, which you can conveniently see
on YouTube. My reaction
is pretty much 'well, okay'. That's a perfectly decent exhibition short,
with everything you'd expect here; there's some action, some graphics,
and so on. But it's kind of unimaginative and pedestrian, and at least
for me there were some confusing moments where I wasn't quite sure what
was going on.

We have verve. We have dynamic situations, visuals, and action
sequences, with clear back and forth moments, reversals of fortune, and
even the injection of some character. What's going on is always clear
and grounded (and it's set in a distinct physical place to help with
that). I think Khara's short goes through exactly the same beats as
CC2's short does (attacked, at a disadvantage, attempt to use ranged
combat, near defeat, reversal of fortune, ultimate victory), but they
are presented so much better. They're interesting. They're exciting.

There's little or nothing in the Khara short that couldn't have been in
the CC2 short. The difference is not CG versus hand drawn (and it's not
clear to me how much of Khara's is genuinely hand drawn; some sequences
looked like they at least had a lot of CG assist). Almost all of the
difference comes down to Khara doing a better job of designing and
realizing what happens in the scenario, in other words to directing and
storyboards.

(When we talk about the quality of directing in anime, it's usually hard
to find such a direct comparison. If you're looking at two scenes in
real shows, there's so many variables involved; the differences between
the scenes, the shows (maybe), the subjects, their budgets, and even how
people feel about the two different shows. This situation is free of
almost all of those variables.)